Don Quijote

[halfaorson]

Lucy, the horrible work that Franco did was (like Bonanni said)to edit the film following Miguel de Cervantes' novel. This NEVER was in Welles' intentions. And the fact that the material was made of scraps only confirms the insolence of this entire project, that was improperly named (let's not forget it) "Don Quijote de Orson Welles".
Franco got no excuse for what he did, but let's not talk about that. Guys, I repeat I understand all the questions and the doubts you got. But if, like I guess some of you think, signing papers is useless, all these questions are even more. All these paralogisms will help less than collecting signs. So I put it more simple : Who wants to help me with this project, raise a hand please.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Pitch the DQ rescue mission to Bill Gates and Bono – the two great philanthropists of the postmodern age! Also try the Museum of Modern Art while you're at it!

[Tashman]

halfaorson: You say you don't know what to do besides collecting signatures (autographs). One thing more you could do is have your interview with Bonanni translated into English. That would be a relatively easy start to your other efforts.

[Glenn Anders]

Excellent suggestion, Tashman.

Cornstarch [or the Voice Within]: I know very little about Welles' Don Quixote (or Don Quijote), having seen no more than a few stills, and a couple of clips.

Possibly the finest living scholar on Welles is Jonathan Rosenbaum, and we have a fine article on the DVD of Franco's version, with a link to an interview with Rosenbaum, in which he discusses Bonanni's footage. The author is one of our colleagues, the Machiavellian Lawrence French, aka "The Scarlet Pimpernel of Wellesnet."

Here is the URL:

http://www.wellesnet.com/quixotedvd.htm

Hope that helps.

Glenn

[ToddBaesen]

I have two main projects which are unfinished. One is “The Other Side Of The Wind” and when I tell you that my partner in that project is the brother-in-law of the late Shaw of Iran, you will understand why we are having a little legal difficulty. The other unfinished film is “Don Quixote,” which was a private exercise of mine, and it will be finished as an author would finish it—in my own good time, when I feel like it. It is not unfinished because of financial reasons. And when it is released, its title is going to be "When Are You Going To Finish Don Quixote?"

—Orson Welles, from FILMING THE TRIAL



Lucy:

Thanks for your interesting reply...

While I find I still disagree with you, I think regarding "Don Quixote" I do have proof... certainly if you believe what Welles said about his work on the movie.

You say: "Orson Welles shot "Don Quixote" in the late 1950 and early 60's. He died in 1985. He had 25 years to complete the film"

So far, this is accurate, but then you add:

"but never bothered."

This sounds like something a person who had read only Charles Higham's biography of Orson might say. Which is fine, but what I don't understand is how you could believe what a biographer like Higham or David Thompson might say, over what the actual subject said.

My point here is if you have read anything about Welles work in depth, and especially on his work on Don Quixote, it doesn't seem possible that anyone could believe he never bothered with it.

So to me, this seemed to be an incorrect statement, and as proof I offer everything Welles said about the project when he was alive. Welles loved this book and financed a movie of it with his own money. Later, for whatever reasons, perhaps he came to believe he didn't want it to be finished and to be seen by the public, but even then he continued to work on it.

To further clarify the issue, here are some comments from Jonathan Rosenbaum on the subject, who as Glenn Anders points out, is one of the well-known authorities on things Wellesian. The complete interview is available right here on Wellesnet at:

http://www.wellesnet.com/rosenbaum_interview.htm


JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: I consider DON QUIXOTE to be the major unfinished Welles project. The problem with Welles, though, is he went around to everybody he worked with and said, "you are the only one I can trust." So you have all these people who are now denouncing one another. Even the people who are friendly with all the different sides, who would like to bring everyone together, so there could be a decent version of DON QUIXOTE, haven't succeeded. I have a friend in Italy who has been trying to do just that. There's also a woman who was the script girl on DON QUIXOTE, who wrote a long piece in Sight and Sound. She says that Welles came close to finishing a version of DON QUIXOTE. What I think, is for whatever reasons, he undid a lot of what he did, because he never lost ownership over the film, and maybe he didn't want to release it. When I met Welles, what he told me, was he didn't want it to compete with MAN OF LA MANCHA, which was just coming out at that time. I think he had a point, because it would have been attacked. That's what happened to virtually everything he released. So if he owned it himself, and he got more pleasure from working on it, what was the point of releasing it? If it wasn't going to make any money and people were going to attack it, he had nothing to gain, and everything to lose.


Now, I must concede, you have made a very good point about the other outlandish rumours I brought up... they just popped into my mind as the most absurd statements about Welles I could think of off hand, but on reflection, you are absolutely correct, they could quite possibly be true, especially the idea of Welles having a son somewhere...

If fact, that seems to be quite a possiblity given Welles sexual escapades, and perhaps he might have had homosexual adventures as well... I certainly have no proof on such personal matters, but there's certainly no proof indicating either of them were true, either. It's also possible Welles could have been a secret member of the Nazi party, which is why he was in Brazil in 1942... maybe he was working working for Howard Hughes who knew he would be taking over the RKO studio in a few years... and his being done there at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller was a cover story...

[Tony]

I think Lucy's wording "never bothered" is strong, but essentially correct. As I mentioned in a previous post, the reason he and Bonannini didn't finish editing DQ in 1970 was because Welles's affair with Olga Palinkas (as she was known at that time) was revealed in the scandal rags, and Welles decide to leave Italy in a huff. In Audrey Stainton's 1988 article on DQ all of this is detailed: how Welles entrusted DQ to Mauro, and then Beatrice picked it up, but later in 1974 Mauro's wife found that Welles had accidentally forgotten about it in an Italian vault, and the Bonaninni's had to save it as they could not locate Welles. Finally they did, and it was saved. This was 20 years before Welles died. I also have a tv interview in which Susan Cloutier describes how she also had an edit of DQ, and in a 1985 conversation with Welles she convinced him to pick up the project again. Welles thought it was a good idea, so he contacted Mauro and asked him to help him again with the editing; at this point, they had not worked on the picture for 15 years. Cloutier put the footage on a ship, and it was mid-Atlantic when she heard that Welles had died.

All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that Welles just lost interest in it. Then the question begged is "why?". My guess is that, as with the book, there is was no dramatic arc to the story, and he couldn't figure out how to make it more than merely episodic; as a one hour tv program (which was the original plan, funded by ABC and Sinatra) it might have worked, but as a feature film, it would have been a much more difficult challenge. This is only a guess, of course, but the fact is that from 1970 to 1985 he did no work on DQ other than possibly a few landscape shots by Gary Graver in the early 70s. As Lucy says, if he had wanted to finish it, he certainly could have.

[Tashman]

no dramatic arc to the story, and he couldn't figure out how to make it more than merely episodic

He was clearly drawn to the picaresque and episodic, though, Tony. PICKWICK, AROUND THE WORLD, LADY KILLER/VERDOUX, and I'm sure others that aren't immediately obvious, might be evidence for your guess about DQ since none got made (by him). But MR. ARKADIN and THE TRIAL would be films of the same working period as QUIXOTE, and it's hard to think of those completed series of episodes as having more narrative meat or affinity for adaptation than the Knight, especially in light of his literary cousin Falstaff. Also, whatever degree of personal preference Welles might have had for a more pronounced story arc (contrary to the preceding evidence), nonetheless his home-base of Europe was then home to all sorts of new-famed directors who had no such attachment and whose films were often celebrated for that very lack. So I think it turns back to your first note about the personal choice. The only difference between ARKADIN and THE TRIAL versus QUIXOTE on this question, was that on the latter Welles was in business for himself. It was not the suitability of the material.

By the turn of the '70s, however, there was the matter of the suitability of color (all prominent exceptions notwithstanding). After CHIMES, Welles had stopped working in b&w, yes? and was soon busy enough trying to sell himself as a contemporary domestic filmmaker. In the home video age it seems obvious that Welles would have worked to put a proper frame around his footage. But it must have seemed at the time that the practical window for Quixote had closed--whether by intention or by happenstance--and he put no artificial demand upon it beyond that point. After this it was his pleasure to talk about what to do with Quixote, while he reserved energy for practical schemes.

[halfaorson]

Nobody will ever now what Orson wanted to do with this material, why he didn't finish the movie, and who should have it. We won't have answers. The only thing we know for sure is we can do something to save this material. Who wants to help me? I'm trying to put it more fast and simple in every post.

[Tony]

Tashman: Manhattan in 1979 and Raging Bull in 1980 encouraged Welles to plan Big Brass Ring and Lear in B&W: if the colour fashion had been stopping him from releasing DQ up to that time, he could have completed it in the early 80's (which may be why he thought Cloutier's suggestion a good one in 1985). As for plot arc, I think you might agree that though Arkadin and The Trial are somewhat episodic, the various scenes do have to appear in some sort of logical order in order to make sense as stories; not so in DQ: the novel just goes along, often seemingly aimlessly and with endless digressions. I know Welles loved digressions (as he told Bogdanovich) but my speculation is that he just couldn't make the thing play dramatically, and this may ultimately be the factor that will defeat every director who attempts to film this, the first of modern novels. My suggestion is that Welles might have been better off to stick with the original plan, which was a one hour telefilm: one can easily imagine such a postmodern novel matched with such a postmodern director (25 years before the concept was thought of and the term coined) entertaining a tv audience wonderfully with the Patty bookend, Welles's wonderful narration, and 6 or 7 scenes, playing on the modernizing of the tale, and the irony and deep humanity inherent in it. Yet to make a movie out of that material seems to me a really tall order, one that possibly defeated even a genius like Welles.

You know, I have a pet theory about Welles: when he didn't finish something, there was a reason, and it was usually aesthetic, not financial.

Just a thought. :;):

[Harvey Chartrand]

Kafka wanted to burn all his books. The executors of his estate said – whoa! Maybe Welles didn't want anyone to see DON QUIXOTE. It doesn't matter. There are only 15 or so Welles films vs 53 for Hitchcock. We must see DQ in as close an approximation to its director's vision as the comprehensive MR. ARKADIN. So it must be done, and so it shall be done.

[Tony]

"...AND SO IT SHALL BE DONE..." (accompanied by lightning and thunder)

sounds kinda biblical, Harvey. :;):

But: I do agree with you that it should be out out. But in what form?

Remember what halfaorson wrote:

"Bonanni would like to realise the film the way it is now. Unedited material, because, like he repeated some times "Nobody will be able to replace Orson, not even me". He doesn't feel he'll be able to remember how he and Orson started the editing of the film."

And if the editor can't remember, who should edit it?

The other problem are the 2 weird sisters, Olga and Beatrice: Olga wants to scrap the McCormick footage which includes the cinema scene, and I'm expecting that since Beatrice helped save the film in 1974 (or thereabouts) and her mom is in it, and Olga hadn't come on the scene yet when her dad filmed it, and she's always trying to "protect her fathre's image", that Bea will be in there like a dirty shirt too. It's all so complicated, I honestly can't see a resolution until the sisters..."pass on".

Which will be a very long time. But still, there's no harm in trying. Halfaorson would like, I think, to organize a petition of our membership to urge the releasing of DQ with Bonannini as "editor". We have 479 members as of last count (though I must admit I've only ever seen about 35 round these parts.

Jeff: can we arrange this?

[Jeff Wilson]

Well, there is the online petition format, which would presumably be the easiest method of gathering "signatures," so to speak. If halforson wants to write something up stating the purpose of the petition, we can get it started, sure.

[Tony]

Sounds good; halfaorson: what do you think?:cool:

[halfaorson]

Thanks Jeff! So now, what I want to do is to translate the interview, to write a short "comment" to start the petion (and Tony, I guess you will have to check that too ), so we can open the page. I will be as quick as possible, thanks guys.

[Tashman]

Side note to the petition progress (at last) . . .

For the benefit of those who haven't read the long valuable interview from Cahiers, 1965:

"[DON QUIXOTE]'s really finished; it only needs about three weeks' work, in order to shoot several little things. What makes me nervous is launching it. I know that this film will please no one. This will be an execrated film. I need a big success before putting it in circulation. If THE TRIAL had been a complete critical success, then I would have had the courage to bring out my DON QUIXOTE. Things being what they are I don't know what to do: everyone will be enraged by this film.

"I started by making a half hour television [program] out of it; I had just enough money to do it. But I fell so completely in love with my subject that I gradually made it longer and continued to shoot depending on how much money I had...

"It is truly a difficult film. I should also say that it is too long; what I am going to shoot will not serve to complete the footage---I could make three films out of the material that already exists."

----

Tony: Looking at the only "somewhat episodic" examples of ARKADIN and THE TRIAL purely from a problem-solving perspective, ARKADIN was a case of taking a basic story which Welles steered away from plot, forcing it into an abstracted episodic form. You might say that whereas Quixote's scenes are insular repitions of its theme, ARKADIN's scenes are repitions that project outward onto the image of some historical or even non-existent Arkadin. But the result of the formula is that scenes which might motivate a story instead play as patches of a travelogue, or movements of music. (I defy anyone to watch the scenes of Mily on the yacht or Van Stratton with Trebitsch and come away with the narrative information.)

THE TRIAL, on the other hand, was entirely a series of episodes from the start. And Welles found a way to make his movie within that established context (a dream, in this case). There is less narrative to work with in this than in Cervantes, not the other way around. So I cannot accept that Welles was defeated by the plot constraints of Quixote, simply because it was picaresque. In other words, Welles would have solved PICKWICK, would have solved Jules Verne, and would have also solved (or did solve) Cervantes. If THE TRIAL was in any way easier, it was because he was less attached to it. QUIXOTE was most personal. That fact may have proved more problematic than anything else.